MUSIC REVIEW: Deborah Harry resumes her solo career with `Necessary Evil'

By CHRISTIAN JOHN WIKANE - PopMatters.com

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I don't like flashbacks in movies/I like the story to proceed/I don't like talking about the old days/Except if it tells where the future will lead.

-Deborah Harry, "The End of the Run" (1989)

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In Greek mythology, the Pythia was a priestess who delivered prophetic oracles at Delphi. She sat in a chamber on the slopes of Mount Parnassus sharing her prognostications with priests and kings. Most recently, she was the muse for "Dirty and Deep," a song Deborah Harry wrote about the 2006 incarceration of Lil' Kim.

The songwriter says, "I was envisioning (Lil' Kim) being inside behind the wall, yet speaking to us through the wall, as the oracle of Delphi did through this little hole in the wall. I just wanted to call attention to what I thought her predicament was and to welcome her back."

Leave it to Harry to meld an ancient myth with a modern misdemeanor.

In fact, I learn a lot from Harry on the morning that we discuss "Necessary Evil," her fifth solo album, where a rewritten version of "Dirty and Deep" appears. Harry is one of the most well-read individuals you might ever engage with, a voracious bookworm among rock legends. She covers a lot of ground for 10 a.m., whether it's astrology ("It's a good sort of social mechanism") or 9-11 ("It changed the value system of New York City"). The songs on "Necessary Evil" are very much like my conversation with Harry - a collection of disparate, three-to-four minute soundbites that coalesce into one stimulating experience.

To arrive at the present, we must briefly flash back 30 years ago, specifically to the recording that brought Harry's face to a worldwide audience with her Blondie bandmates: "In the Flesh." Produced by Richard Gottehrer, the song was a dreamy, girl-group-styled pop tune from Blondie's 1977 self-titled debut that cast a spell over Australian audiences upon its release.

At the suggestion of the Toilet Boys' Guy Furrow, Harry re-recorded "In the Flesh" for the two-disc Blondie compilation, "Sound and Vision" (2005). Furrow introduced her to Super Buddha (aka Barb Morrison and Charles Neiland), a production team who helped Harry shape the song's structure into an entirely different beast, something more akin to the darker moments on the original Blondie album, but with beats instead of a full band.

"We ended up completely re-writing the song," she says, "changing the complexion of it completely. It went on from there. I just started calling them with little ideas that I had."

Before long, what was intended as a one-off collaboration developed into an entire body of work that finds Harry as naughty or nice as she wants to be.

Her inspired union with Supper Buddha comes 14 years after Harry last ventured solo on "Debravation" (1993), an underrated effort that featured no less than eight different producers and ended Harry's relationship with a major label. Prior to that, she released three solo albums, "KooKoo" (1981), "Rockbird" (1986), and "Def, Dumb & Blonde" (1989). Each was greeted with various degrees of attention in the U.S., but UK audiences, who'd embraced Blondie long before "Heart of Glass" topped the charts in America, seemed more receptive to Harry as a solo act.

"I don't think that I really had a big priority push from the labels that I was on," she confides, alluding to Chrysalis, Geffen, and Sire. "We did have some attention from the club area. We got some airplay. I love the music on them. I thought some of the songs were really great."

Now on the indie Eleven Seven label, overseen by 10th Street Management, Harry is free of any corporate pressure to keep up with the latest trends in pop music or record with certain producers.